Data compression is used extensively in modern computing devices. The use of data compression in computing devices includes video compression, audio compression, and the like. Compression reduces the quantity of data used to represent digital video images, audio file and the like.
Video compression typically operates on groups of neighboring pixels referred to as macroblocks. The macroblocks are compared from one frame to the next and the video compression codec generates a difference within those blocks. The compressed video may then be transmitted and/or stored as a series of reference frames encoding the macroblocks of a particular frame and one or more non-reference frames encoding the macroblock differences between the reference frame and another reference or non-reference frame. The difference between a reference frame and non-reference frame is whether any following frame will use it as a reference.
The frames of audio and video data are sequential and therefore encoding and decoding the compressed data can be done sequentially. The encoding and decoding, however, is typically computationally intensive causing processing latency, needing high communication bandwidth and/or large amounts of memory. Accordingly, there is a continued need for improved techniques for encoding and decoding video data, audio data and the like.